Let's not let Groups fail

I am writing the day before the Swansea U3A Open Day at which the Groups will present themselves to the public in the Dolphin Hotel. Blogs always show the latest posting (chapter) first, so if you are reading this blog for the first time then scroll back to the first posting, headed Introduction-Start Here, and read forward through the postings to get an idea of what it's all about. Then if you feel you have something to contribute to a posting click on the 'pencil' and get writing. Blogs are interactive so you too get published on the internet, but don't expect me to field every query.

It seems ironic for someone charged with helping the formation of new groups that the first task is to help saving two valid ones, but here goes.

RECORDER

This is an 8 year old group facing breakup because Florrie the current convener has to drop out with eye-sight problems. We all hope the imminent cataract operation will be a huge step back to normality for her.

Recorder groups are a feature of almost all U3A organisations right across the UK. It seems a great shame that this one is failing. Volunteers please, ideally two or more. Surely the role below suits someone, given our 600 strong membership in Swansea. It's as true as ever that you get out more than you put in.

The person would need to be a capable player but would not have to lead the group technically merely to co-ordinate the meetings which are in member's homes, and join in the playing.

Secondly I would like someone to form a separate Beginners Recorder Group. Overtime some players would move to the more advanced group, an approach which seems to have been immediately successful with the last year's Watercolour Painting Group. If such a group were to include the likes of me it would have to be prepared to start with learning to read a single line of music and find the appropriate notes on a recorder.

Florrie Toft knows that the recorder played well makes beautiful music, even to concert standard, and way beyond the sound produced by a typical primary school group. In other parts of the country adjacent U3A join forces occasionally to form much bigger orchestras and socialise.

I speak as someone whose mother taught piano and desperately wanted to help me play piano and then the violin, her response after I cut off the little finger on my right hand because you see the right hand merely bows - such a stupid mistake I made! She was far more successful with my younger brother and sister who both play beautifully.

Music is nevertheless one of the passions of my life, and one of my chief regrets is not having learned to play. Something simple like the recorder would be an ideal recovery route. Surely I am not alone. It seems like an ideal topic for a U3A group and once playing who knows where it would lead, clarinet, keyboards .... now what I would really dream of is to playing full speed harmonically improvised bebop on a saxophone - an impossible objective which does but shouldn't stop me trying something. By the way we went to Cardiff recently to hear the Welsh National Opera production of Otello, which appears shortly at the Grand. They say I have eclectic tastes, I guess that's a sign of being through the mill and being influenced by so many wonderful different people and cultures. When I suggested to the class in my best Spanish that I didn't like the word University in U3A, the advice was to think of it as the 'The University of Life'. I rest their case!

In the last posting I got hung up on the topic of simplicity, the departure in my mind then was recorders. For Simple does not limit something to Trivial. The simpler the instrument, I guess, the more it responds to sensitive playing, and therefore the more rewarding it is to an improving player.

A few weeks ago I had reason to take the underpass in the centre of Swansea across the Mumbles Road to buy tickets for a Latin American event. As I crossed alone with my wife a busker started up on a tin whistle with a plaintive traditional tune, and kept playing until we left by the steps on the other side. We both remarked on the beautiful sound that was being produced from such a simple instrument in this echo chamber. On our travels in Peru, our first trip to South America, we found a back room in a cafe in Trujillo where the enthusiastic owner encouraged itinerant musicians to drop in at night and play. Every night was a wonderful experience, but none matched the man who brought only his poncho and simple wooden flute and played traditional Andean music evocatively, and then stretched to 'Yesterday' , by the Beetles, in order to welcome us two gringos.

FRENCH CONVERSATION

A group with plenty of enthusiastic members who are folding for the sake of a French Tutor to lead the group. Jan Phillips feels they need a tutor, who feels at home with both the grammar and the spoken language. Surely there is a member out there with experience in teaching French who would be prepared to help people enthusiastic to learn. Maite, my Spanish teacher, has largely converted to teaching adults because she finds it so much more rewarding. If there isn't a volunteer then perhaps the group should consider sharing the cost to employ someone with the necessary skills.

Another avenue would perhaps be to change emphasis, maybe reading and discussing books written in French a chapter at a time, maybe listening to and exploring one of my passions the French Chanson where the words count for more than the music. People like Georges Brassens, Georges Moustaki, Jacques Brel and Barbara or even Madame Sarkozy, the Italian born Carla Bruni, whose first album (Quelqu'un ma dit) is tuneful and uses simple French. They often use poetic language to explore left wing politics, liberal thought, love and life.